Ryser Type Conditions for Extending Colorings of Triples

In 1951, Ryser showed that an $n\times n$ array $L$ whose top left $r\times s$ subarray is filled with $n$ different symbols, each occurring at most once in each row and at most once in each column, can be completed to a latin square of order $n$ if and only if the number of occurrences of each symbol in $L$ is at least $r+s-n$. We prove a Ryser type result on extending partial coloring of 3-uniform hypergraphs. Let $X,Y$ be finite sets with $X\subsetneq Y$ and $|Y|\equiv 0 \pmod 3$. When can we extend a (proper) coloring of $\lambda \binom{X}{3}$ (all triples on a ground set $X$, each one being repeated $\lambda$ times) to a coloring of $\lambda \binom{Y}{3}$ using the fewest possible number of colors? It is necessary that the number of triples of each color in $\binom{X}{3}$ is at least $|X|-2|Y|/3$. Using hypergraph detachments (Combin. Probab. Comput. 21 (2012), 483--495), we establish a necessary and sufficient condition in terms of list coloring complete multigraphs. Using H\"aggkvist-Janssen's bound (Combin. Probab. Comput. 6 (1997), 295--313), we show that the number of triples of each color being at least $|X|/2-|Y|/6$ is sufficient. Finally we prove an Evans type result by showing that if $|Y|\geq 3|X|$, then any $q$-coloring of any subset of $\lambda \binom{X}{3}$ can be embedded into a $\lambda\binom{|Y|-1}{2}$-coloring of $\lambda \binom{Y}{3}$ as long as $q\leq \lambda \binom{|Y|-1}{2}-\lambda \binom{|X|}{3}/\lfloor{|X|/3}\rfloor$.Comment: 10 page

On Robust Colorings of Hamming-Distance Graphs

Hq(n, d) is defined as the graph with vertex set Znq and where two vertices are adjacent if their Hamming distance is at least d. The chromatic number of these graphs is presented for various sets of parameters (q, n, d). For the 4-colorings of the graphs H2(n, n − 1) a notion of robustness is introduced. It is based on the tolerance of swapping colors along an edge without destroying properness of the coloring. An explicit description of the maximally robust 4-colorings of H2 (n, n − 1) is presented